(Editors' Note: The author composed a series on three great bishops of the early church for midweek Advent services last year. As both biographical and spiritual stories, they are a good way to incorporate the history of the church into the present life of the church. The stories of Ambrose and Augustine will follow.)

My name is Athanasius. Athanasius? I sense that that is an unusual name for you who live in the twenty-first century. It was, however, a common name during the century before the fall of the great city of Rome in A. D. 410. Of the other two church fathers who will come to visit you during this Advent Season, I am the oldest. In fact, some historians believe I was born in the third century, maybe about the year A.D. 298, so I can speak about events and personalities in the Roman Empire that the other church fathers will not be able to. For example, in my lifetime, from A.D. 298 to 373, members of the orthodox Catholic Church experienced torture, persecution, and often martyrdom under the Emperors Diocletian and Galerius, who reigned from A.D. 284 to 311. Later in my lifetime, Christians suffered political intimidation and persecution during the brief reign of the reactionary Emperor Julian the Apostate, who attempted during his brief three-year reign of the Empire to return the people to the worship of the pagan Roman gods.

During these times, people of faith and church leaders suffered because of their allegiance to Christ. There was always the option of avoiding persecution by forsaking Christ and worshipping the emperor. Most of them, however, did not. They were beaten or put on a rack, on which their limbs were either broken or twisted into strange shapes.

The most devastating harm, however, rendered to the Catholic Church during my lifetime came from within the church. One Arius of Alexandria, Egypt, grew up in Libya, North Africa, and was schooled in the liberal arts in Antioch, did the most harm. He and his followers, who carried on even after his death in 336, plagued me throughout my life. Because of Arius’ cleverly composed theological teachings, I ended up going to numerous church councils that were held in various sites in the Roman Empire and sent into exile from my home in Alexandria, Egypt, five times.

How did the conflict begin? What drove Arius to do what he did? It all began long before I succeeded Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, Egypt, as bishop in June of 328. I had already written my most famous essay entitled “On the Incarnation of the Word” when I was a mere nineteen years old. In it I had argued that the coming of uncreated God in flesh should be understood as God’s recreating the fallen creation. The eternal and incorruptible God, who created all things out of nothing, ex nihilo, became flesh in the corrupted material world. I knew when I wrote that I was countering the influential Greek philosophers, who thought the good, the beautiful and the true were something to be discovered through the workings of the human mind. Some of them also believed that material things always had existed. I believed that our God made us out of nothing, but his Son was begotten from eternity. This incorruptible and immaterial Son of God took unto himself a body like our corruptible bodies from a spotless virgin and gives up his body in death on the cross for the penalty of our transgressions. This sin brought upon us death. Arius said that the Son was created in time and space and was less than the Father in heaven. How could such a savior be my savior?

This conflict broke out at about the time Alexander became bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, in 313. The scholarly and clever Arius wanted to be bishop. With time it became evident how badly he wanted it. Isn’t it in our natures to grasp at positions of power? Wasn’t that Adam and Eve’s original transgression?

At that time I was barely into my teens. The people, however, wanted Alexander; they didn’t want the quick-witted Arius. Arius may have been witty and crafty, but he was not smooth and polished. He didn’t have the people skills, as you would say today. Instead of being appointed bishop, he was made a theologian in one of Alexandria’s larger churches. Arius wasn’t satisfied; Arius wanted more, and he could not give up this sinful inclination.

After Alexander accepted the appointment as bishop, Arius sat in his office and brooded. He desperately wanted the office of bishop. Do you not see the same behavior today? Even though people don’t always get anything out of the transgression of envy and jealousy, they still do it. Arius did it, and he did it in a crafty way. While Arius brooded and obsessed about his loss, he composed a clever poem countering the official teaching about the person of Christ of the orthodox Catholic Church.

Arius was a gifted man, skilled in logic and rhetoric. Arius taught that since God was called Father, there must have been a time when He was not a father; therefore, there was a time when the Son was not. He set these words to a song called a Thalia. Sailors in the Mediterranean ports sang it, and it spread quickly across the Rome Empire.

Emotional brooding will hijack people’s thinking powers every time. It did with Arius. The best in what we do as men and women comes from our rational powers. Arius did not think through his argument from a historical perspective because he overlooked what church fathers like Origen and Clement had already said about the Word becoming flesh. He also did not read Scripture accurately, especially he did not read the Gospel of John closely when Jesus said to his disciples, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). Is not the radiance of Sun the same as the Sun? It is part of the Sun’s nature. We cannot separate them, can we?
Arius would repeat his song over and over and over again: “There was a time when the Father was not a father; there was therefore a time when the Son was not.” Like other created things, the Son was created out of nothing. At times Arius, who could cleverly change his teaching like a chameleon, said the Son was not only less than the Father but even unlike the Father.

Arius also had other skills besides writing poetry. He was a skilled and avid letter writer. He communicated and clarified his teachings to leading officials throughout the church. He did this especially after Bishop Alexander had gathered together church leaders together in Alexandria, Egypt, and officially condemned his teachings. His teachings spread like a house on fire across the entire Roman Empire. Sailors in many ports sang his songs. His teachings spread even as far as Cordova, Spain, and up into the province of Asia. The Bishop of Caesarea embraced his teachings and so did the bishop of Nicomedia.

For a while when I was a presbyter under Bishop Alexander, and I thought we had rid our city of Arius and his teachings. At our time there were no schools of theology to counter Arius’ teachings. What the emotionally brooding Arius did was force us to examine and study Scriptures and the earlier church fathers still more closely. We searched and found passages that reflected the equality of the Son with the Father.

Arius had said that when the Gospel of John calls Jesus the Word, the Logos, it was an attribute of God; but we claimed that the Word, the Logos, was at the center of who God was, his essence, his ousia. Is not this the way John the Evangelist uses the term in the Prologue of his Gospel? Our arguments, however, seemingly did nothing to change Arius and his followers.

Then one Eusebius of Nicomedia, came to follow Arius. He had heard of our condemnation of Arius and promptly wrote Emperor Constantine, who was nominally a Christian. He had nominally embraced the faith ever since he entered into a military conflict with Maxentius, who claimed emperorship, too. It all happened at the Milvian Bridge outside the city of Rome in 312. Constantine was faced with the battle of his life, a battle for his position as emperor. The night before the battle, he saw a cross in the sky and heard a voice say, “In this sign conquer.” He did, and he won. Since this historical event, he made himself the protector of the Christian faith and responsible for the harmony in the Roman Empire, that at the time was a mix of Christians and pagans.

Upon receiving Eusebius’ letter, Constantine called a council of bishops from all over the Roman Empire to the seaside city of Nicea on the Aegean Sea. The year was 325. The city was ideal because the name means victory. In Nicea only a year or so before, Emperor Constantine had won another important military battle. Now, he wanted a different type of victory, a victory of harmony for his empire. He treated the bishops royally. He paid for their travel to Nicea. Here some three hundred bishops (many of whose bodies were twisted and permanently misshapened) met to work though an orthodox teaching of the person of Jesus. Moved by the physical plight of many of the bishops, Constantine sympathized with them and granted them the authority to decide on the official teaching of Christ for the Catholic Church.

You today still confess the creed that the Council of Nicea said was the official teaching of the church, the creed that countered Arius and his followers. The key line is “being of one substance with the Father.” The Greek word for “one substance” is homoousios. The Greek term does not appear in the Scriptures, but we needed a term that summarized what we read in the Scriptures. The Council lasted from the end of May, through June and July, until August 25 in the summer of 325. Finally the bishops settled on this term to describe the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Thereby, they confirmed the Savior’s position in the Trinity as being equal with the Father.

For a second time Arius was condemned and excommunicated from Catholic churches and sent into exile with his friends. The teachings of Arius, however, didn’t go away. Eusebius of Nicomedia had reluctantly signed the loyalty statement of the Council of Nicea and was influential enough to carry on where Arius left off. After I became bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, he brought charges against me. One charge accused me of the murder of Arsenius, an illegally ordained bishop in a nearby city. The Arians thought I would discipline an illegally ordained man by murdering him. While Arsenius was hiding among the monks near Thebes, Egypt, the followers of Arius secured a severed hand and claimed I used the rest of the body for magical purposes. They accused me of participating in magical acts often. Crudely, they put the hand in a box and displayed it as proof that I had murdered Arsenius.

Emperor Constantine, always seeking to maintain harmony in his empire, used the celebration of his thirtieth anniversary as Emperor to bring me to trial in Tyre, just outside the boundary of the Holy Land. Tyre, a hotbed of Arian supporters, drew many Arian bishops to the trial. I was personally acquainted with the Thebaid monks near Alexandria and knew their native tongue, Coptic. I was able to persuade Arsenius to come to Tyre incognito. Forced to stand in the trial room as a common criminal, I had Arsenius covered with a linen and called him into the trial room.

Asking the Arian representatives whether they knew Arsenius and hearing their affirmative answer, I uncovered Arsenius. The audience was shocked, for many had come to believe their own lie. There standing before them was a man they thought I had murdered. But I didn’t stop there. I showed them, how ridiculous their charges were. I said, “Show me your left hand.” Arsenius stretched out his left hand. “Show me your right hand.” Arsenius stretched out his right hand. “Do you have another hand?” “No,” was Arsenius’s emphatic answer. John Arcaph, who had brought the charges against me originally, bolted from the court room, but Eusebius, who was made of sterner stuff, claimed I had again worked my magic.

Soon I and four other bishops went by boat to Constantinople, the imperial seat. Constantine was annoyed at our presence but eventually summoned all the Arian bishops who had been present at Tyre to come to Constantinople. There the Arians dropped all charges against me but brought forth a new charge. This new charge surprised me completely: I had supposedly kept grain shipments from Alexandria from reaching Constantinople. The grain was meant to feed the poor of Constantinople. Constantine sensed the depth of Arian opposition to me, and for the sake of harmony in his empire, sent me into exile to Trier, Germany, another imperial city.

Arius meanwhile was released from exile and sought to take holy communion in the large church of Constantinople at about the same time. An aged orthodox bishop of Constantinople, another Bishop Alexander, prayed in his church that either Arius or himself should be taken from this life before such an outrage would happen. The next day Arius was found dead in a pool of blood in a public bath. His followers ascribed his death once again to my black magic. Those who knew about the bishop’s prayer ascribed it to the judgment of God, and the general public ascribed it to hemorrhaging of his diseased heart.

Meanwhile, I was off to Trier, Germany, to begin my first of five exiles due to the physical and political pressures of the Arians. They remained a strong force throughout my entire life until I died in 373. Though I was in exile numerous times, I defended the truths of the Nicene Creed. Many even called me “Mr. Nicea.” I liked that nickname. I was proud of it. I lived and died by the phrases you confess in the Nicene Creed, especially the phrase, “being of one substance with the Father.”

In an essay I wrote later in my life, I said the position the Arians had taken was untenable from a rational point of view, for isn’t the relationship between the Father and the Son like the relationship between the sun and the rays of light that come from the sun? You can’t separate them. Or isn’t it like the relationship between a fountain and a stream? One cannot exist without the other. Are they not both water? Yet, they are different. And isn’t it true that God the Father doesn’t generate like an earthly father? Think about it: if He is eternal, what He generates is eternal. What an earthly father generates is mortal, just like the father is mortal. The Arian teachings are not logical. They did not draw upon the best in humankind, for what God gave us when He created us in His image was his rational powers.

In that essay, I called the Arians atheists, because they did not worship the truth of God, but they worshipped a mere man. How could a mere man save humanity? My position was that my Savior, who was born in Bethlehem, was of the same essence as the Father. It was an important truth to defend because the salvation of humankind depends on the fullness of God being in a bodily baby, reconciling all of creation to God.

It may surprise you that I didn’t write the Athanasian Creed that is sometimes recited on Trinity Sunday. It bears my name because it contains many of the truths I fought for and for which I was willing to go into exile five times.

I am Athanasius, the defender of the orthodox Christian faith.

Gordon Beck is Pastor at Salem Lutheran Church in Florissant, Missouri.